I have 1669 bookmarks saved to del.ico.us, complete with a tagging system. I use RSS feeds of particular tabs to feed content to this website. I’ve exported the lot and now I need a new online bookmarking service.

Here’s the spec:

Essential

online, accessible via Firefox and IE

user-defined tags

RSS feeds for tags as well as account

full backup to CSV file

no flash elements to the site

Optional

Firefox bookmarklet

comment space

iPhone app version

I don’t want a microblogging site like tumblr, just straightforward online bookmarking. So, any suggestions out there? Pinboard? What else?

(And they’d better not bugger up flickr. I might go and back it up in case…)

I lasted all of two weeks with tumblr. I found the user interface needlessly fiddly, and had two SNAFUs with the queue system. And when the aim is to publish one item a day, you really expect the queue system to work. So, I’m forgetting the design blog on tumblr.

I really enjoyed pulling things together for it, though, so it’s now available as a proper blog: striped polkas.

So if you want to get a daily dollop of design, you can subscribe to its RSS or follow striped polkas on twitter. There’s also a facebook page, if that’s your preferred way of following stuff.

Posts are scheduled to go up between 10 and 11 each morning, and I plan to only do one a day, as I know how much stuff some design blogs drop into my google reader each day and how it becomes tempting to hit ‘read all’.

I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I just used a Manics song as a post title. If you now have this as an earworm, I can only apologise.

I’ve had a tumblr account for ages but haven’t been able to work out what to use it for. Basic link library? I already have del.icio.us. Microblogging? Twitter. Blogging? You’re reading it.

Finally, I might have worked out how to channel one of my interests into it and it’s going to be a daily post featuring a design I like. It might be a print, or a object, or clothes. I’m planning to feature UK designers as much as possible although the first week is heavy on the etsy as a quick way to get started.

These aren’t necessarily things that fit some objective view of ‘good design’. I may have done design history at university, and have some very fat books on modernism on the shelves, but I’m actually pretty eclectic in what I like. And the tumblr will be stuff I like and that you might like as well.

I’ve had to withdraw from the Exeter Twestival work. It’s just not realistic to juggle a busy day job and heartburn-induced sleeplessness with trying to run something that needs more time than you can give. The night should be great, and I’m sure it’ll raise the target amount. If you’re in Exeter on 25 March, I’d recommend it. And a friend’s band is on the bill so we may try to make it along still. Depending how wiped I am.

On the plus side, I found two handy tools whilst working there which I’m just sorting out for here. They’re both twitter tools, so stop reading if you hate it.

Twitterfeed is an RSS to twitter syndication tool. It lets you feed multiple sites through to one twitter account, set the frequency it checks them and add prefixes or suffixes. I remain a big fan of RSS: it really is simple and it lets you configure things how you like.

Tip: if you use WordPress as your blogging platform, use the Extract section to set what’ll appear in the tweet. So you can add hashtags etc. Otherwise, these tools take the title and as much of the first sentence as can fit into 140 characters and your tweet can read rather brokenly.
(If you don’t use WordPress, why not? It’s as simple or as complex as you need it to be.)

I’ve got mine also picking up my del.icio.us feed, prefixing it with ‘bookmark’. Del.icio.us, despite its takeover by yahoo, remains my favourite online bookmark tool. Although my tag system there is in a mess…

My Tweeple is a tool for managing your followers/following and is a lot easier to use than the actual twitter webpage interface. It shows whether the relationship is mutual, for starters, and a mouse hover function lets you view the most recent tweets of new followers to decide whether to make it mutual. It also has an export to CSV tool, enabling you to get a spreadsheet of people at a particular time. Very handy.

I’ve a backlog of blog posts to write up from the past few weeks and will hopefully start clearing them over the coming days.